The fourth attempt to build a common authentication platform between government and its citizens already is starting on shaky ground.

The General Services Administration’s 18F organization released a request for quotes for a vendor to provide online identity proofing and fraud detection Sept. 27 for its Login.gov portal. Bids were due Oct. 11.

This was the second time in a matter of weeks that 18F issued this RFQ. It issued the first one in mid-September through Schedule 70 and decided to pull it back soon after. It’s unclear why GSA decided to withdraw the solicitation.

An industry source said the reason GSA pulled back the initial RFQ was due to it releasing it under the wrong schedule. The source, who requested anonymity, said vendors also complained to GSA that the RFQ appeared to be “wired” to Experian or Equifax.

Other sources say the RFQ is based on “old thinking” that even the National Institute of Standards and Technology says isn’t good enough for identity proofing.

David Zvenyach, the acting executive director of 18F and deputy commissioner of the Technology Transformation Service, defended 18F’s path. He said the RFQ had a quick turnaround time of only two weeks because either companies provide this type of service—identity proofing and fraud detection—or they don’t. Like many RFQs, GSA extended the due date at the request of the vendors who were interested in submitting bids.

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Did Dave Mader, the controller of the Office of Management and Budget, just open the door to private sector firms providing financial management shared services to agencies? I think he might just have propped open a door that has been shut for several years.

At the recent Association of Government Accountants and ACT-IAC Shared Services Summit, Mader said addressing the supply and demand problem—more demand than there is supply of shared services—may come back down to industry.

“These are multi-year projects and I think what we find ourselves now is actually at a point where we don’t have the capacity to handle all of the demand. We haven’t decided how do we increase the supply?” he said. “There are a couple of options. We could go to the existing providers and say, ‘can you up your capacity?’ Well, then you get into the dilemma of where do they get the funding to up their capacity? I don’t think anyone will say build it and they shall come. How do you guarantee that actually you will have clients in the future if you make the investment, but even with the franchise funds you have now, people don’t have the capital to make those kinds substantial investments. So it’s kind of a Catch-22 that we are in.”

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Sometimes covering the federal IT community is like a bad roller coaster. The buildup when going up the big hill is exciting and stomach churning. But when the downhill falls flat, you feel a little cheated. That’s the feeling today when it comes to cloud computing. You can’t shake a stick at a conference without someone mentioning the need to the cloud. The crucial role software-, platform-, infrastructure-as-a-service play and will continue to play in the future of federal IT always is hot topic.

But then Deltek’s GovWin puts out a report that is like that flat roller coaster ride. GovWin, a market research firm, looked at preliminary federal procurement data for fiscal 2016 that shows spending on cloud computing hasn’t lived up to its hype.

GovWin found civilian agencies have awarded $75.4 million in cloud contracts in 2016 and the Defense Department, its services and agencies awarded $45.3 million in 2016. We have to take into account that these numbers DO NOT include fourth quarter spending for DoD, as military procurement reporting usually is three months behind. For example, the Army made a $62 million award to IBM for a private cloud toward the end of 2016 that’s not included in GovWin’s numbers.

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Government contractors are out of luck if they are unhappy with large dollar civilian agency task orders.

Industry’s recourse to protest these requests for quotations (RFQs) on popular vehicles such as Alliant, EAGLE 2, OASIS, T4NG and many others are limited to those options that many say are ineffective or too costly.

Contractors can thank the Senate for putting them in this situation. And if the upper chamber’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2017 gets passed, bid protest authority of task orders worth more than $10 million may continue to go down the drain.

First, let me start with the most immediate problem. The Senate let the authority of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to hear protests of civilian agency task or delivery orders worth more than $10 million expire on Sept. 30.

This expiration only applies to civilian agencies as Congress made the ability of contractors to protest task orders issued by the Defense Department to GAO permanent in 2011. And this bid protest ability doesn’t apply to task orders against the Federal Supply Schedule or broad agency agreements either.

But as Rob Burton, a former deputy administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and now an attorney with Crowell & Moring, said this is bad news for contractors.

“Contractors could go to the Court of Federal Claims, but that’s very expensive and there is no automatic stay feature and most contractors really don’t pursue this approach. They still could go to the contracting officer and lodge a protest, but that doesn’t usually result in any remedy,” he said.

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With about four months before the end of the Obama administration, the push to recognize, even celebrate, and institutionalize its management agenda is coming fast and furious.

The latest example is around category management. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy released a draft circular for public comment on Oct. 8 detailing six broad areas of category management, including cementing this new governmentwide approach in policy, and the strategies and governance processes that go along with it.

Comments on the draft circular are due by Nov. 7.

OFPP believes the initial success of category management is so clear that it decided to publish a new circular around it — something that is rarely done anymore.

“This circular brings together these earlier policies and expands upon their concepts of economy and efficiency to establish the key principles, strategies, policies, processes, governance structure, and roles and responsibilities to implement category management fully as the principal way in which the government acquires and manages its common requirements,” OFPP wrote in the circular. “This circular does not address unique, agency/mission-specific requirements determined by the appropriate agency leadership to fall outside the scope of this directive. OMB category-specific policies (CM policies) will include instructions for making these determinations, as category strategies are developed.”

Anne Rung, who left on Sept. 30 after two years as OFPP administrator, said in a blog post on her last day that category management already saved the government $2 billion, and agencies were on track to save a total of $3.5 billion by the end of 2017.

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The line to influence the next president’s administration is getting longer by the day. The traditional good government groups, such as the Partnership for Public Service, have been working the campaigns for a year or more.

But recently, the traditional Washington think tanks also are lending their voice, and opinions, to the ever-expanding community of commentators.

Both the Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation released white papers/blog posts trying to drum up support for President George W. Bush-era initiatives.

Reason released its 2016 Privatization Report by John Palatiello, who also is president of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition. BCFC is an organization that advocates against unfair government competition with the private sector.

Palatiello highlights six examples of agencies or Congress moving forward with initiatives to get out of work that is commercially available. For example, Palatiello wrote about the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) trying to get out of the commodity IT business. He also uses the Defense Department’s increased use of energy saving performance contracts to help get military bases and commands efficiencies without upfront costs.

Congress has prohibited any use of funds to run public-private competitions under OMB Circular A-76 since 2008. The Obama administration also tightened the definition of what duties are inherently governmental in 2011. So the examples of privatization are few and far between and there is no application of A-76.

Heritage’s David Muhlhausen asked whether it was time to bring back an updated version of the Bush administration’s Performance Assessment Ratings Tool (PART).

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Oracle is leaving the General Services Administration’s schedules program. It’s not going to just stop selling directly through the IT schedule, but the software giant will no longer use third-party resellers either, according to multiple sources.

Let that sink in for a second. One of the largest software vendors in the world is telling GSA, thanks, but we can live without you.

Sources said Oracle decided the GSA schedules just weren’t worth the hassle any longer — the compliance requirements, the potential and real threats of False Claims Act lawsuits and the new Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) rule, all played into this decision.

“The federal market is a very small chunk of their business and while it seems big for us, when you look at someone like Oracle’s overall business, they have to expend an exorbitant amount of resources for little payoff,” said Jennifer Aubel, a principal with Aronson Consulting, who said she wasn’t familiar with Oracle’s decision. “With the TDR and even with not having to do price reduction clause reporting, a company like Oracle would still have to do monthly reporting and there is a lot of concerns, including how GSA will keep the data secure.”

Oracle made $38.2 billion worldwide in 2015. Its direct sales to the federal government were $60.8 million in 2015, according to USASpending.gov. Even if it made just over $2 billion in federal revenue through its resellers, the federal market accounts for about 6 percent of Oracle’s total revenue. And disengaging from GSA doesn’t mean Oracle can’t sell through other contracts, such as the Army’s CHESS or through enterprise software agreements with the Defense Department.

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Since May, the Defense Department has more than doubled the number of approved commercial cloud computing providers.

The military services and agencies now have more than 50 vendors to choose from to buy commercial cloud services at low and moderate security levels.

That’s a good start for DoD.

“For low-risk stuff, we actually access those clouds over the internet. When we move into moderate risks, we’ve actually worked direct connects into the commercial providers,” said Rob Vietmeyer, DoD’s government lead and strategic adviser to the chief information officer on enterprise cloud computing, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop on Sept. 15. “In commercial data centers, we can do our network peering. We’ve tied it into our perimeter defense for our Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) environment so we can firewall and filter for some of that traffic so we can protect the NIPRNET from any of the threats that may originate in that cloud environment.”

Now the challenge is to figure out how to move above security level 3 to levels 4 and 5 for high-impact systems. While 88 percent of the systems across government are considered low or moderate risk, the majority of high-risk systems reside in DoD or the Department of Homeland Security. Since DoD has the most high-impact systems in government, and moving those to commercial clouds is more complicated.

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HCaTs is back on track. Alliant 2 continues to come under attack. These are the days of our GWAC lives.

The General Services Administration gave the go-ahead to 109 vendors who won spots on the Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTs) unrestricted and small business contracts to begin promoting and selling against the governmentwide acquisition contract.

“The stay of performance that resulted from the HCaTS protests has been lifted,” wrote GSA to in an email to vendors, which Federal News Radio obtained. “The HCaTS Kick-Off event will be scheduled soon.”

GSA made the awards under 20-year, $11.5 billion HCaTS in May, but 26 protests delayed the launch of the program.

Over the last three months or so, the Government Accountability Office denied or dismissed the protests freeing the GWAC from the stay issued while under protest.

With the notice to proceed, agencies can start buying an assortment of services for the pool of vendors:

• Customized training and development services;

• Customized human capital strategy services; and

• Customized organizational performance improvement

While GSA received good news around HCaTS, it’s next generation IT services contract known as Alliant 2 continues to face obstacles.

Just over a month after GSA faced its first bid protest over Alliant 2 by Enterprise Information Services, a second vendor submitted a protest to GAO.

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In less than two weeks, the Office of Personnel Management is expected to launch the new background investigation service to help fix the mess created by a series of incidents ranging from a lack of contractor oversight to the massive data breach affecting 21.5 million current and former federal employees.

Officials promise the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB) will be a much different organization than its predecessor, the Federal Investigative Services.

“It will have a politically appointed director, will be headquartered in D.C. and be a full member of the Performance Accountability Council, so it aligns with customers for increased accountability and formulation of policy. That is key,” said Jim Onusko, transition leader of the NBIB, during the INSA-AFCEA National Security Summit. “With the NBIB transition team, nothing is done in a vacuum. We work closely with the transition advisory group, including the Defense Department, the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget and other federal agencies. In addition, we’ve created eight new key functions for the NBIB to transform how the government performs background investigations. In addition to those eight new key functions, we also enhanced seven legacy functions to more effectively and efficiently perform those investigations.”

Onusko said one key new function is the creation of a Senior Executive Service (SES) position to lead the Federal Investigative Records Enterprise (FIRE). This person’s charge will be to automate and digitize the NBIB’s processes.

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